After SARS hit Ontario in the early 2000s, a public inquiry was called to determine how the virus came to the province, how it spread, and how the outbreak was handled. So, too, were inquiries called over E. coli deaths in Walkerton, a protester shot in Ipperwash and murders in nursing homes.

But in the case of the novel coronavirus, Ontario Premier Doug Ford has so far resisted committing to a public inquiry once the outbreak is under control. Pushed this week by opposition leader Andrea Horwath to make the pledge, Ford promised to “review” the hard-hit long-term care system — but stopped short of heeding the request for a “full, independent public inquiry.”

The PCs’ minister of long-term care, Merrilee Fullerton, adopted similar phrasing in the House. “There will be a review. The scope and the levels of detail are yet to be determined,” Fullerton told the assembled MPPs.

And pressed in a media conference later that day about his reluctance — CBC’s Mike Crawley pointed out the inquiries that followed SARS, Wettlauffer, Walkerton and Ipperwash — Ford again committed solely to “reviews” on COVID-related matters like long-term care and procurement.

Federal officials have dodged promises of a COVID-19 inquiry, too. At an announcement this week, seniors minister Deb Schulte was asked whether she’d seek a national inquiry into long-term care. Schulte replied by citing a focus on the current crisis, and that a time would later come to “reflect on the lessons that we’ve learned and the work that needs to be done.”

While governments’ individual motivations for evading commitments to an inquiry are unclear at this stage, political experts who spoke to iPolitics in recent days pointed to several factors that could be under consideration.

Control over the parameters of the investigation

The key difference between a public inquiry and a government-led review is the control the governing party can exercise over the information being scrutinized, and later released to the public, the three experts who spoke with iPolitics agreed. “If it’s a government review, in other words, the sitting government gets to control the thing,” said Peter Graefe, an associate professor at McMaster University with expertise in political institutions.

“It’s going to be led by bureaucrats, but the bureaucrats are responsible to the minister, presumably of long-term care in this instance, or the ministry of health. They aren’t responsible and open to the public. The government can do a lot to quiet things down, to set the parameters,” he explained. “If there are things they don’t want to look at, they can decide not to look at them. So there’s a much greater capacity to keep things private.”

While governments can establish public inquiries, and create the terms of reference for them to follow, the work of the inquiry is carried out independently under the direction of one or more commissioners. The arms-length nature of inquiries can be beneficial for governments, Graefe argued.

In the case of Ipperwash, a public inquiry was established shortly after Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals took office, though the events in question occurred under the administration of former PC premier Mike Harris. “You don’t want a political show trial. You put it to an independent commission that can study what happened, in the hope that it doesn’t look simply like a political vendetta by Dalton McGuinty against Mike Harris,” Graefe said.

An inquiry can shield governments from allegations of “cooking the analysis,” he said. And making difficult decisions after the inquiry wraps could also be easier, Graefe believes, if any controversial moves were recommended by an independent inquiry — rather than bureaucrats.

A public inquiry also conveys a sense of magnitude, Queen’s University doctoral candidate Jacob Robbins-Kanter told iPolitics, versus the more regular practice of a government reviewing events or policies in-house.

Greg Flynn, who also teaches in McMaster’s political science department, noted that in terms of risks, an inquiry could foreseeably veer off in unanticipated directions. In the case of the Elizabeth Wettlauffer nursing home murders, the Order in Council that established the inquiry asked for an examination of the events leading up to the killings — as well as the circumstances or contributing factors that let them happen. The order also let the inquiry examine “other relevant matters” to avoid history repeating.

The commission wound up reporting on a wide range of issues, including nursing shortages in long-term care — which they attributed to “limited government funding” provided to homes for nursing and personal care staff.

“They generally have pretty broad powers to compel witnesses or obtain information,” Flynn said, discussing the work of inquiries. “So they may go down rabbit holes that the government didn’t intend.”

Recommendations and government priorities

There are some benefits to forgoing a public inquiry in favour of a government review, Graefe and Robbins-Kanter pointed out. For one, the recommendations that come from a government review may be more closely aligned with that administration’s objectives and, importantly, capacity.

“This is both a strength and a limit. (A review) is probably going to be more politically responsive, in the sense that commissions of inquiry can make proposals that the government has no interest in, or capacity to put into place,” Graefe said, adding that a review could be more “politically feasible.”

The limit to pursuing a review rather than an inquiry, in his view, was that an internal review may shy away from embarrassing the government too badly. “There may be important things that aren’t really taken on in a way they should be, for that same reason, whereas a commission of inquiry can be a bit bolder in terms of pointing to the elephant in the room,” Graefe said.

And it’s also a question of how expensive each option would be for the government. “(A review) would be probably be able to highlight a lot of the issues that would be coming to light in a full inquiry,” Robbins-Kanter surmised. “But without all of the cost and maybe the length of the process.”

A matter of timing

Speaking of length, when public inquiries were established by the Ontario government to examine the 2003 SARS outbreak and the 1995 shooting of an Indigenous protester by a police officer in Ipperwash, each inquiry’s final report took upwards of three years to be released to the public.

An 2005 inquiry, which looked at how allegations of abuse of young people in Cornwall were handled by the justice system and other public institutions, took more than four-and-a-half years to publish its final report. That inquiry was widely considered unsuccessful, according to 2018 research by Manitoba law professor Gerald Kennedy. The Cornwall inquiry, he wrote, was “extensively delayed” — in part due to five judicial reviews that took place.

Other Ontario inquiries have proceeded more swiftly — including the 2017 probe into long-term care sparked by eight murders perpetrated by former nurse Elizabeth Wettlauffer. That inquiry finished its work in just two years. And a probe into water contamination that killed seven people in Walkerton back in 2000 proceeded faster still. From the inquiry’s establishment to the public release of its final report, the process took roughly 19 months.

Governments can exercise some control over the timing of inquiries, but at a cost — that kind of move can elicit backlash, and has done so. During the recent national probe into missing and murdered Indigenous women, the inquiry requested a two-year extension from the feds. They were denied and given six months instead. The decision was panned by the inquiry’s chief commissioner as prioritizing “political expediency” over matters of safety.

Timing is something both Graefe and Graefe and Robbins-Kanter believe the government would weigh, when considering making a committment to a public inquiry. Ontario, for example, is facing an election mid-2022.

“The timing is definitely something they would consider. It would be strange for them not to,” Robbins-Kanter said this week. Both academics pointed to the risk of an inquiry exposing vulnerabilities in the provincial government’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis, though Graefe said the former Liberal government would “presumably” also face criticism in the case of an inquiry.

If an inquiry was set up by later this year, Graefe said, “by the time it reports, it could be in a year’s time — which would put you in the lead up to the next election. So yeah, that’s certainly an issue, I would think, for the premier.”

But Flynn doesn’t believe the 2022 race will, ultimately, play a role in the PCs’ decision on COVID-19 — predicting, instead, that the scope of the pandemic, and clear indications of issues in some areas, will make it difficult for the government to pursue an internal review rather than an inquiry.

“I think it also is one of those rare circumstances that everyone accepts that most, if not everyone, was unprepared for this,” Flynn said of the coronavirus pandemic. “So I don’t know if there will particularly be a finding of fault.”